


Above Her The Sky

by Go0se



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Dogs, Everyone plays MC differently and every one is right, Gen, Hoodie!Sarah, Hope, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Monsters, Panic Attacks, Past Murder, Sarah's a meandering type, Suicidal Thoughts, but also kind of a fix-it, minecraft au, not really a fix-it, slice of life?, wandering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-04-01 15:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4024261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three worlds to live in, in her unnamed life. More than she wanted and far more than enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Above Her The Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jaythewriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaythewriter/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Beyond the Gate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1986909) by [jaythewriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaythewriter/pseuds/jaythewriter). 



> ^ For that particular Jay, whom I love and apologize to for this taking so long, oh my god. (And who I can formally gift it to! How did I not notice that button before.)  
> I have changed some game elements to suit my own purposes mostly because I can. Please heed the warnings and take care of yourselves.

  
-

 **  
** She didn't know how long she'd been on the road. Beating pavement, beating sun. (Still cold.) The sad man had been easy enough to track, slowly; always him ahead with a car and an idea, her trailing after with nothing. Always nothing. But the river follows the banks until it knows no other way. They'd  headed south, keeping out of sight of anyone. No one missed them where they left from. So easy to disappear.

When she'd reached the last place his tired treads lead it turned out to be the woods again. Different from hers _,_ but close enough to be familiar; the slants of the branches pointed back to long, long years wandering on leaf mulch in the Alabama stillness alone.  
(Mostly alone.)  
(Thin eddies swirling underneath ice. _Useless, useless_. She pushes the thoughts away.)  
Finding the shell of his truck was a surprise. He'd left it in the middle of a clearing with the doors wide open. Dust had taken over the inside. She'd paused, looking at it. Wondering. But a river doesn't stop until someone kills her, and someone had missed the chance.  
Footprints in the dirt led away from the vehicle, up to a pile of rotted wood that'd had purpose a long time ago. A gate in a fence, maybe. Beyond it, the only way out from the clearing, was a farmer's field. Waves of long grass shimmered in the sun.  
She stepped over--  
  
*  
  
\-- and stops.  
The field is gone. Above her the sky is an unending unrelenting blue where seconds past it was only wisps of gray. Surrounding her are birch trees. They stand pale and thin where oak had been before. Automatically she turns back to the gate, but the gate is gone, and the woods behind it are gone. Instead, steep hills she doesn't recognize rise in clumped, even banks, maybe a hundred feet behind her.  
The shock of it dredges up an old memory, complete and overwhelming as flood: sudden movement, irrevocable crossing, stumbling without sight with her hand pressed to her head to stop the bleeding, crying out in shock and pain, new to both, such a small thing; the darkness like mud clapped over her face; the trees, the howling, the cold, the static, the static _grows_ \--  
she clamps her hands over her face and trips backwards, not thinking not thinking not thinking, as fast as she can stay on her feet. Her back hits something solid. She drops, her sharp knees up like a shield in front of her. Eyes between space between her fingers. Breathe sharp and narrow and quick. She shakes.

  
She waits, but Nothing doesn't come.  
  
The angles of the birch shadows shift as the sun in the blue sky moves across its arc, but the trees themselves are still.  
  
Gradually the panic ebbs. She lowers her hands. Staring.

  
Wherever she's gone, it's quiet. No wind stirs the leaves or the grass, but clouds slide over the sky. The air smells real. Clean. As she watches, a large pale bird wanders past on the hill opposite her, flapping its wings as it hops down the uneven sides. A smaller one follows it, mimicking the motions and mostly succeeding. Strange.  
She gets up. Shakes, falls. Gets up again, walks over to the hill, and it doesn't vanish as she gets closer. The packed dirt leaves a smudge on her skin when she presses on it; warmed by the sun, smelling like all the dry rich earth she'd ever known, and it settles her heartbeat a little.  
Everything around her is quiet. The hills rise on three sides of where she stands now, rolling gently into the distance. She cranes her head, trying to see what might be past the earth and thin grass. Far away, something sparkles. A glint of water maybe. There's no other footprints or smoke. No sign of anyone at all.  
No one to follow, no path to trace. Two choices remaining.  
(So easy to disappear.)  
  
She goes forward.  
  
  
*  
  
  
From on top of the hill she can see that more surround her in all directions, except for where she'd been facing when she walked into this place, where forest stretches all the way to the thin horizon.  
The climb up the one hill had made her tired. Walking through all the others would only get worse. And it's too open, too unfamiliar. Paranoia rises like adrenaline through her. Paralyzing.  
When the sky starts to get dark-- evenly, but faster than it seemed like it should, _no no no_ \-- she doesn't think, just trips ahead of herself.  
Until she stumbles on a patch that gives way under her feet.  
It's only a short fall. She lands in some small hollow just barely big enough for her to lie in. Dark. Earth on all sides. She isn't even hurt, and looking up through the hole she fell through she can see stars burning in the strange sky.  
She stays there, curled up out of habit. Eyes closed against the sparks that float across her vision, and the sounds that filter through the makeshift dirt walls but she can't be hearing must, not be hearing. She doesn't sleep.  
  
Eventually sunlight ignites the back of her eyelids. She carefully gets up, pulls her not-face over her mouth to avoid breathing dirt and digs her way out of the hollow with her hands. The earth is soft, easily movable. The hollow opens up about halfway down the hillside she'd fled. Forest stretches below her. Birch and birch and oak, slowly sloping downhill.  
  
She walks through the white trees quickly. Although they don't move their blankness makes her skin cold and her hands shake. She can't stand it. The oak is better, even if its shadows make her nervous still. She covers as much ground as she can.  
She doesn't stop at all, doesn't plan to, until she notices the bright shine of an apple in the upper branches of an oak and it pangs her chest and her stomach at the same time. Only then does she realize how much the world's spinning around her. Climbing the tree is easy enough. The apple is solid and cool in her hand, fresh and cold in her mouth. Her bitemark comes away bloody, which she ignores. She eats the whole apple quickly, scarring her soft throat with her haste, and then looks for more.  
It takes a while and she only finds three in the immediate grove. She eats two more right then to ward off the dizziness, puts the last in the front flap of the schoolbag she'd stolen a while ago from a gas station somewhere in Texas.  
In the backpack she has: an empty plastic water bottle; her gloves; her not-face (still, still, forever); a couple of stale oatmeal bars; her shattered camera; the knife. And now an apple. The backpack itself is dusty and worn but with sturdy seams. She zips it and, suddenly exhausted, uses it as a pillow against the bark of the tree. She's careful not to damage the fruit.  
  
Sleep still doesn't come, not entirely, but when she opens her eyes again the light's faded. She looks up, expecting to see the waning moon.  
Instead she meets several sets of eyes that glow like coals.  
A visceral terror sits in the tree opposite her, only a few feet away and several branches higher. Eight shadow-coloured barbed legs as long as her torso and thick like branches, pincers visible in front of the face clicking with malice. It started towards her like it'd been waiting, movements sharp and intentional.  
She's afraid it'd jump, but instead it drops down into the darkness. Worse. Invisible, it could be anywhere. She presses her back to the trunk of the tree without breathing and keeps very very still. Three layers of branches between her and the ground. Safe enough. Had to be.  
She still flinches and clenches her fists at the first skitterings of spider legs against bark. Closing her eyes through the noise and the minute shakes of the tree as the spider below her tried to climb it was an instinct. Unquestionable. Didn't help. Her heart beat in tandem with the shakes. Over and over and over and--  
It's a long night.  
  
But when the sun rose next the monster lost interest, somehow. Its eyes quenched and it wandered away.  
She creeps to the ground and watches it with one hand on the nearest branch, keeping her breathing muted. She isn't surprised it exists, not _surprised_ , but it leaving without any interest or doubling back was bizarre. Impossible. Nothing never just _left her alone._  
  
Staying still isn't an option. Monsters or not, vermin or not. Keep moving.  
  
Farther and farther into the forest, the regular oak trees she'd seen from the hilltop start to change. They darken and grow, rounder and rounder, sprouting up until their leaves make a ceiling the sunlight only drips through in patches. The air smells different, she realizes. The grass is softer and thicker under her shoes.  
She doubles back three times to where the normal oaks stand unassumingly, walking over her own footprints just to be sure. One, two, three times back. But they all match up. The ground doesn't move, only her. The change is natural; or real, at the very least.  
Forward, then. Cautiously. The trees are huger than she knows how to explain. Old growths. The quiet here is heavier than before, somehow.  
The mushroom is pale and unexpected, two things that light up her flight reflex instinctively. Only spare seconds stop her from turning and running and running. But that's long enough to see: it's not nothing, just an unmoving plant. Giant, but no immediate harm. She walks its perimeter and then presses the toe of her shoe on its stalk. Cranes her neck to see the smooth arcs along the underside of its bloom. It looks exactly like ones in her forest, except three times the height of her. It smells like crumbling rich earth. Cellars. Swamp gas memories seep up from the dark. She closes her eyes to them, grinding her heels into the dirt. In the dappled sunlight that filters down from the packed leaves, she's less afraid than she might have been.  
Still, the strangeness and newness of this place hits her like a wave. She turns her back to the stalk and leans against it, feeling its fragile hollowness against her spine, unable to stand.

*  
  
  
A few nights following she hears a spider again, clicking its way though the undergrowth. She keeps still and the monster passes by.  
But she's not safe. She learns, the longer she stays here: there are many kinds of monsters.  
  
One kind she sees from a distance, only wants to see from a distance; tall as an adult person but four-legged and mottled green skin, or scales; creeping along the ground day or night and exploding whenever threatened, leaving pits in the earth. She thinks of them as 'creepers' because of their movements, learns to watch behind her.  
Zombies, too: pulled straight out of media she vaguely remembers from before other pieces were poured into her head. They stumble with arms putrid and outstretched, slow but able to close in quickly when they sense her nearby. ('Sense': blackened pits for eyes, so they can't have _seen_ her. She doesn't think doesn't think doesn't think about that.) The noise they make is the worst. Revulsion pushes her to find higher ground away from them, more than fear. They burn in sunlight. The air stinks after.  
And then there is what she thinks of as 'witches' if only because of the hats they keep, which hobble along with hidden hands inside their robes. The first time she encounters a witch there was the sound of glass shattering apart on her back, a brief sense of warmth without pain and a burst of sulfur, then suddenly nausea like falling into water from a great height: all-encompassing, overwhelming. She'd spun around instinctively toward her assailant, registered the hat and robe and grotesquely misshaped, stretched face, the teeth too sharp and serrated to be human as it laughed; and then she ducked another thrown bottle. The movement made her head ring and her stomach revolt. She'd only barely managed to get to her feet and hide in an enclave of rock nearby, shoving loose gravel between her and the witch until no light bled through, slumping down in the resulting darkness and breathing hard. Choking down half an apple had helped the nausea ease, after some time. Still, it'd shaken her. She hid behind her hasty gravel wall the whole day and then the night, too, while murmurs and occasionally yelping laughter like coyotes trickled in. The need to move was back with her the next morning, along with a better instinct. When she sees something approaching that has two legs and a silhouette she doesn't consider or stare. Only runs.  


All of these, but the worst for her are the bones. Impossible skeletons that hold onto bows and arrows with fleshless hands. Like the dead things they burn in the daylight, but that doesn't make it easier. They're stilted-walking pieces of her nightmares, tripping inevitably towards her whenever they find her at her weakest, rattling and grinning sightlessly, hunting her alone. Terrifying. They're the worst out of all of them, because of the fear; old afraid, remembered afraid. But also because, seeing them, she wanted to fight. To _burn_. Every morning, looking down at things that hunted her while they caught fire and vanished without trace, without recompense, her hands itched for something-- a knife, a gun. Finally she settled for rocks. Finds some loose ones under the dirt one day, grey and bare. They fit solidly in her fist. Night comes, the bones follow her into small spaces and she beats them with the stones and with her hands until they shatter apart, leaving arrows and ulna among piles of dust. She stands over the remains, stinging from arrow nicks and exhaustion but head and nerves rushing with something that washes out the fear. Unnerving. She can't name the feeling, or won't. Isn't sure which.  
A river's a lot of things, but she's never been violent before. Not like this. It feels like a sickness in her head, pulsing heavily. She doesn't want it. Can't let it go.  
The arrows stay on the ground. She gathers the marrow-dull remains into bundles and lays them at the bottom of her backpack along with the stones. Reminders. They rattle with every step, turn her wandering into music. Mindless noise but it drowns out the quiet, the static in her thoughts.  
Comforting.  
  
  
*  
  
  
She doesn't know how long she's been walking in this place when she finds the railroads, but they make her pause.  
  
Holes in the earth and under the earth, normal by now, the sudden ravines and cliffs in the middle of otherwise rote forests or fields. The glint of rails laid down metre by metre, not normal. She sees the line of tracks and railties in a dip she'd thought was just another hill going lower than usual. Without any reasoning, she follows it down.  
The light turns to shadow and the rails go from standing on stone and earth to what's, unmistakably, flat wood. Her steps echo enough in the space to pull out other sounds: pops like boiling water, a spring's susurrus. The cave's underground air is wet and dark. The wood groans under her feet.  
People lived here. Did live. She doesn't know how long ago, or their names, or where they came from, if they were like her or some other species. The existence of them resonates inside her lungs like a struck bell nonetheless.  
She follows the broken rails until they lead her to a place off a branch of tunnel that feels larger when she walks into it, though she can't see enough to know if that's true. Under her feet there's flat, packed dirt. The air changes, smelling dry and stale. If she listens without breathing she can hear a low hiss, a kind of scratching, that sets off a rattle in some deep mammal part of her brain: _threat_. Monsters nearby. But it's muffled enough to mean there's a wall between her and the source of the sound.  
The room gets darker and darker around her as she goes deeper into it, until all she sees is a kind of rounded out impression of something in front of her, written over by waves.  
She finds the torches because she almost trips over them. When she picks them up, feels the uneveness of the wood and smells the sulphur, a memory flares. Trivia from a movie two lifetimes ago. She takes the solid side of the stick in her fist and drags the other end against the stone wall. With a long scratching sound the torch flares.  
(And it's _fire_. For so long she avoided anything like it. She waits for--- fear, unknown shadows. She waits for panic and falling and nothing. But instead her heart is a steady ticking clock, circling and circling. She's less steady than she was Before whatever had made her this way, so far past now it's completley washed away, whoever she was gone, but she's steadier _now_ than she had been. She breathes in. Breathes out.)  
In the light, she is standing in a room; wide, dirt-floored, walls climbing up in a curve and converging to make a ceiling about three times again high as her head. Along the north wall sit bulky wooden chests and cot-beds. Relics, remnants. The cots are made up with thin pillows and red blankets folded tightly against the sheets, corners down, one by one in a row like a hospital ward. Along the back wall there's a pile of metal and thin wood sitting by several identical benches that have tools arranged along them in geometric lines. Some are shovels, rusted into uselessness. Several are curved stone on top of sticks, bending like a frown and covered in dust.  
The word 'mine' floats through her head. They were real where she'd been, when she actually lived in the world she inhabited (she knows she had a life once and a name, she  _knows_ ). But they hadn't been real near her: outside the forest and the cities it was mostly farming that led people out into nature. Corn and wheat fields plowed and marketed. Nothing like this, heavy and underground. But nothing much here is like it'd been where she came from. She isn't surprised.  
All the chests' locks are rusty and weak. They pop off with a couple pointed shoves from her foot. Inside them are books full of writing that don't make any sense to her, unlit lanterns, bits of metal and twine, wooden bowls, two or three crumbling loaves of thick bread that's whole and unmoldy despite the thick layer of dust over everything else. In one chest there's several constructions of woven leather and overlapping metal plates that smell sharply of blood, big enough to fit a large animal. Maybe there are horses here. She hasn't seen any, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. (Has not to. No one's seen _her_ in so long.)  
The worn blankets billow dust when she pulls them off the cot beds. Nothing underneath them but mattresses stained with age and dampness. The blankets themselves are sturdy enough. She folds several tightly and stuffs them in her backpack. Also takes the twine and the bowls and the bread; leaves the horse leathers, the books behind. She's had enough of codes.  
  
  
*  
  
  
There are difficult things, even in the daytime away from monsters. Constantly shifting hunger. Phantom aches in her head, sharp ones in her back. The heat. Her sweat. The cold at night. Her shaking. Paranoia flares and sparks. Waking up afraid of her own shadow, genuinely afraid, and hiding during thunderstorms. Almost tumbling into lava and feeling for a second the huge gulf of space around her, the lack of anyone to even call out to. Alone.  
It had been like that in the forest in Alabama too, and the terrible non-place before it that's the first thing she can remember. Old feelings, forever feelings. (The space and the aches and the shadows and the alone. The fear itself is new. She thought that it had been burned out of her head by a black sky without a sun a long time ago, but maybe she is wrong.)  
One mercy: her nightmares slowed to a drizzle here, somehow.  
  
The landscape seems to match her as she walks through it. Like maybe that was what helped her lose the dreams: they appeared outside her skull instead. Skeletons stalk with their unseeing grins. Chasms yawn in the ground where they have no reason to be, like her thoughts fall away from her without warning. Things shift in and out of existence and sense, faster than they should. She walks through a glade around sunset to suddenly see a tree burn down from the lava at its feet. Returns the next morning and it's grown again, just as tall. The lava itself as strange as the giant trees, simmering like fear in random pools at the edge of forests it has no place being in, or spewing from the stone sides of hills without eruption or smoke. Water does the same; pure and cold, pouring out from cracks in stone that she can feel the back of if she puts her hand up to them, drenching her arm to the elbow. No reason for it to be there, no underground spring for it to flow from. But it does.  
It would be frightening. Would make her slip and doubt and check behind her constantly, but-- the sun rises and the sun sets, here. Easily, slowly. Always. She can stand underneath any (unmoving) tree and watch the sun make its steady way across the sky, then watch the small pinprick stars spin their own paths when it passes below the horizon line. Comforting, too.  
  
  
*  
  
  
The creatures look like nothing from a distance. Move like it. They only stretch out their arms to steal, like it; but what they take is earth or rock or trees instead of minds. They vanish and return, leaving thin bruises in the air behind them.  
They are not monsters. Not exactly.  
The first time she had seen one she held her backpack to her like a useless shield and rapidly walked backward from where she had been heading, turning her eyes away instinctively, clutching at her pockets for her not-face. But she hadn't felt the dizziness and nausea nothing brought. Only afraid. When she looked back that first time, the thing was gone. She notices more of them, later. They move towards her as if curious, then flicker away. Nothing had been sickening and threatening and encroaching. These are quiet. They watch her, following from a distance like shadows but never pushing forward.  
  
Except for once.

  
Night, and she'd learned night is danger. She spends the afternoon searching for a suitable place to try sleep in the wide, endless hills she's passing through. Finds a tall overhang of mud and stone set into a hill, floored by dirt with a pond ankle-deep at the edges in the middle of it. Good. She hacks up mounds of dirt with her hands and her shoes, arranging it to make a front wall. Leaves only a small space at the top open to the outside air, so she can see the stars. Then she unpacks, laying out her life on a small outcrop of rock with her back to the stone and dirt wall. She eats an apple-- still crunchy, even after days in her heavy backpack, and her mouth is barely even bloody anymore. She makes up a fire with twigs and the flint she'd picked up after seeing it glinting in some loose gravel days (weeks?) before, and uses it to heat two crushed mushrooms she'd found growing on the spongy grass between the old growth trees. Spearing them on the knife, turning them over the flame until they gleam, scooping some water into a bowl, sliding the mushrooms into it, crushing them with the flat of her knife. It made a decent soup. Warm and enough to fill her stomach, at least.  
Afterwards she filled her water bottle, washed the bowl, put them back in her backpack. Took her jeans and socks and shoes off, laid them out on the rock and put her legs in the water. They grew cold in seconds. Soothing.  
(Once she had found a warm spring-- a slow, regular river crossing but lava flowing beside it, separated only by thin rock. Heat bled through. She could see the sluggish glow through cracks in the stone and sand banks. Filled with awe.)  
She closes her eyes for a second, for once. Body grounded; palms on rock, heels digging into pond-bottom sand. Ears listening to the soft crack of the fire, the water's lapping. Head quiet.  
When she opens her eyes the creature is looking down at her. Though something seems to grow and rise in the dark air around them, her head's quiet persists. She looks back.  
In the darkness of the hollow the creature glows from the inside. The eyes are over-large, but not like windows in anonymous buildings. They are aware, assessing. Human pupils surrounded by black irises surrounding by sclera bright, incandescent blue. There's the soft impression of a rounded nose below them, a thin mouth. A darkness covered and blurred the features, floating just above the creature's skin like moving clouds. The body made up of thin planes of sky; dark, purple-tinged, seeming both light and endlessly dense, like there was something beyond it to understand. (Impossible to understand.) Pale wisps floated in front of the black eyes and down the sides of the face, stopping above the thin line of shoulders. Dry spots like scabs or scales covered the rounded edge of the shoulders in swirling patterns. Soft purple stars floated around the creature, like dust motes in a blacklight.  
In the absence of fear and noise, she doesn't think _why_. There is never, never, never answer to that question. Instead: _how? Who_?  
Film reels. Knowledge carried downstream. Her head rushes, then pounds. Her own name is a mystery lost in the mud and against rocks down the falls, but this woman's-- the one belonging to the woman this creature had been-- spills out of her throat before she knows she thought it. “Amy?”  
Her own voice startles her. It sounds dusty, creaky. She realizes abruptly how cold her legs up to her knees have gotten but can't move. Caution locks her in place.  
Amy watches, translucent blonde hair floating in a non-existent wind. She blinks and shapes her mouth into what might be words, but all that sounds is a strange crooning, like a cough.  
She wonders if Amy is trying to say her name back to her. If the creature even recognizes her name.  
The creature tilts her head like she's trying to get a wider view. With the movement, the darkness-cloud covering her skin splinters ever slightly.  
She can see the peach skin of Amy's neck beneath it, can pinpoint where the peach blackens to a horrible necklace of mottled greens and angry reds, marks of a breath stolen until another didn't start.  
Because Amy was _dead_.  
The thought is sharp, and she reels backward as if she'd stabbed herself. Old terror and unease wash through her, the world spinning. _She_ isn't dead; she has a heartbeat; she walks and covers ground that changes; she can't be gone. But Amy is, she is; the angry boy had killed her a long time ago.  
_Alex._ Something in the deep pools shifted. She felt it in the meat of her spine. She remembered the angry man, him and all the others, and she hadn't thought of them in so, so long. She'd been-- getting _better_.  
Bubbles rising fast through black water, sickening and swirling like whirlpools. She braces against them, grounding herself in her hands. _No, no, no._  
She waits, holding her breath and the dirt.  
Eventually the swirling settled. Shame stayed behind with it, bedraggled and reeking. She opens her eyes, blinking when they're wet and distorted, and looks away from Amy's face. Instead, down at the water, at her own reflection and her knees beneath it. It'd been a long time since she'd looked at herself. Startling as her voice was.  
“I'm sorry,” she says out loud. The words shake. Against the tide and the self-loathing, she's surprised by the truth of them. Sorrow. It's a strange feeling, almost. Before... what good was her sorrow, before, when worse things would happen? She knew, could see, couldn't stop them. Wasn't hers to stop. It hadn't mattered whether she was regretful or not. _Useless. Irrelevant. Useless._ Deeper and deeper we go.  
But she was.  
Amy should have had a good life surrounded by ones she loved. Instead Amy had been attacked and beaten by someone she'd trusted and believed to be good; she'd been taken by a monster and turned into dry meat, into mist, into whatever she was standing indigo and scaled in front of the pond in this strange, unearthly place. Amy never deserved that.  
(So what does she deserve, herself?) ( _Stop._ )  
“I'm sorry,” she repeats. Repeats, repeats. Useless still.  
  
In the water Amy is a soft blurring glow. She stands, then moves slowly, avoiding the pond with careful steps on reptilian feet that don't lay flat, like someone's dream of a werewolf. Twisted and strange, but Amy moves, stopping near her. Amy speaks, but again it's a nonsense mix of a gurgle and chirp.  
“I can't understand you,” she says. She doesn't know if Amy can understand _her_. But the strange, exaggerated creature keeps looking at her with Amy's eyes, so surely something must go through. She's gotten so close to her, too. Less than a foot away. She can feel something from the strange clouds encasing Amy's skin. A smell like lightning. Crackling. Cold. Her eyes meet Amy's black ones. Wisps of Amy's strange hair drift slowly in front of her face. She doesn't flinch when Amy stretches a scaled violet hand out toward her.  
  
The pain is immediate and shocking. She's unhooked; vision wiped out red; heart stuttering, lungs stilled--  
yards away--  
and then with an unceremonious crash it's over. Air rushes back in a singular gasp; she lands on her feet somehow, drenched from the knee-down and spilling water everywhere; stumbling backwards onto the flat rock she'd laid out her backpack on. Everything on it falls off with a clatter, spilling out in all directions in a circle from where she fell. The fire, drenched, sputters and dies.  
The pain left so quickly she's shaking. Nothing follows it, nothing stays; no stinging, no sick feeling, nothing. And she shakes.  
  
Amy is gone. Twinkling jagged particles float outward from where her stretched form had been, a study in negative space.  
The only sound in the dark is her own breathing, her ceaseless heartbeat. Abruptly, with a sharpness she didn't expect, she feels _alone_. She wants to call out to Amy to come back; babble out her apologies again, not to _leave_. The small space she's made for herself suddenly yawns wide.  
Useless, anyway. She says nothing, only looks down at her empty hands, clenching and unclenching them. She starts slowly gathering her spilled belongings from the ground.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
There's no clocks, no numbers. No overarching sense of time.  
  
She fills and refills her bottle with water from pouring springs and digs out mushrooms from the dirt whenever she's hungry. Keeps mostly to the pine forests where they seem to grow in more numbers. When she sees rails leading under the earth she follows them, finding flat-floored rooms like the first and chests that hold the same heavy bread, the sane blankets, bowls.  
She has been in this place long enough to need to cut her hair. The knife sits familiar in her hip pocket. Her backpack is fraying, lumpy with mine loot, alongside whatever apples she finds. She's tied a stick (sturdy enough to grip, wider at one end) to one of the shoulder straps with some string she found; it serves as her shovel. Rocks and bones and earth tumble around in the darkness at the bottom of her backpack, chipping at one another to the rhythm of her steps. Tolling. Heavy and real.  
  
  
*  
  
  
It's the bones that draw them to her, eventually.

Chickens, rabbits, soft-eyed cows, pigs, brown bats, sheep, fish: this world has so many of them, she's learned. By now she's even found horses, beautiful and indifferent to her, on a wide prairie field.  
In the middle of an afternoon in an oak forest she learns that there were also wolves.  
  
She's zoned out on her guard, leaning against a boulder with a blanket around her shoulders like a cloak, her backpack propping up her sore feet. On its side, zippers half undone. When she opens and focuses her eyes, sensing somewhere in the back of her head that something has changed, her backpacks' contents are spilled everywhere and two large shaggy wolves are nosing through the rest of it. Marrow crunches loudly against their teeth. Two or three more of them lope through the shadows under nearby trees, moving away and circling back and moving away.  
One of the wolves close to her looks up from eating the bones, then sniffs her shoe.  
She focuses very hard on not quickening her breathing. She doesn't move.  
The wolf nudges her shoe again, curiously. After a couple seconds of panting it lets out a small bark. The other looks up after from its own crunching, ears forwards, and nudges her too. It pads over to the firsts' side, leaning their heavy shoulders together. Then, miraculously, the two of them lay down.  
She waits a couple of tense seconds before bending her legs up cautiously. They don't stir. She feels behind her on the boulder for handholds, pulling herself to higher ground. From above she watches them, not sure what to do. Can't leave without her backpack. Can't fight without the rocks.  
  
She watches, as the shadows of the forest begin to stretch longer and longer. Wildlife disappears into the air, here. She's seen it happen. The pack that were running in the trees are already gone. But the two wolves in front of her lay still.  
  
Come nightfall, hunger pulls her down from the rock. The wolves haven't stirred for a long while. She holds her breath, though, as she puts all her weight on one foot and all her faith in her right hand. She grabs onto her backpacks left strap and pulls. It lifts off the ground easily, and for a brief crystal second she thinks she'll be able to walk away into the night and forget this as much as any of the other moments of near death-- and then the second strap gets caught with a lurch on one of the wolfs' paws.  
The wolf wakes up with a yelp. The other--- mate? Family member?--- startles awake at the noise, eyes wide and reflecting the moon.  
And she, she doesn't think, just looks down at the both of them (kneeling on one knee, her backpack's one strap held uselessly in her loose fist). And her head rings, rings, rings.  
And then a second miracle: the wolf extends its head, and she closes her eyes but she doesn't feel teeth. Only soft fur. It headbutts her, light and easily like-- like a puppy. The other one barks quietly, a single burst of sound.  
She opens her eyes again. They both look up at her, eyes wide and warm-seeming, friendly dog-smiles lolling.  
Carefully, she takes a bone shatter from the bottom of her bag (placing it on the ground), and then chucks it as far away from her as she can.  
The wolf on her left scrambles to its feet and bounds away, trotting back moments later with its Husky-like tail curled and fluffy. It settles down to eat. The other, beside it, makes such despondent eyes that she finds herself digging into her bag a second time and dropping it some shatters, too. The second wolf chows down as happily as the first, but louder.  
She sits on the edge of the boulder again, looking at their attentive shoulders. She waits for a while, unbelieving, then very slowly and very gently reaches to touch one of them. The wolf rippled its back at the feel of her hand and looks up, but doesn't move away or attack. It even whuffs something that could've been a greeting at her. The other noses forward, licking her hand.  
She stares down at them, her head getting crowded again. Suspicion, and disbelief, and lingering fear, and more emotions she can't quite name. But just for a minute. Just for a minute, hope. 

  
*  
  
  
You can't train a wolf to be a dog, but she didn't train them. Speciation. Instantaneous. Somehow, here, some of their wildness left them and in its place was dog's affection and loyalty and softer eyes.  
They follow her wherever she goes. She ties strips from the ragged blankets around their shaggy necks, not wanting to lose them if they ever run into a pack again. The brightness makes them easier to see against the dark, too. The dogs deserve names but she doesn't have any to give them that don't already belong to the dead. She rubs along their ears and necks, and their sides when they lay down, and hopes they understand.  
She doesn't want them to disappear, anymore. Slowly she learns to trust that they won't. She makes sure not to leave them either.  
  
“Wherever she goes” means _wherever_. The dogs never lose sight of her for long. It's a truth here, she learns; like the speed of how everything grows. Anywhere she turns they're by her side, warm and solid and breathing. They follow her, she follows them, whichever way. But they always move together and never go very far.  
It's familiar.  
Her companion from a long, long time gone now is a flicker in her thoughts, a candle in the back room of a dark house. She'd thought of him when she was in those first huge, shaded woods; when she broke off a piece of the tall green plant that grows by riversides and chewed, curiously, to find that it was warm and sweet. When she cut her hair. And now, when she sits down tiredly on the grass and the two dogs settle down next to her. She knows that by now he's probably gone, himself. Definitely at least changed.  
The knowledge is heavy in her chest, but not sore. Her memory's somehow become clear ice, cold and sure, at the same time her nightmares fled. Even through the cracks in it she can see his face, remember the things they gave each other. That itself is a miracle. It isn't worth pain.  
So she remembers him, and Timothy, and Jay, and Brian and Jessica and Seth and Alex and yes, Amy; the names and clear faces released in her head, but they don't flood her mind the way they did at first. She used to get lost in the roaring but now she only drifts.  
(Her own name stays hidden somewhere, out of reach. But maybe she's grown beyond it now.)  
  
One day she climbs down from the tree she'd spent the night in, and her dogs are laying at the trees' feet like usual in morning, except a puppy is laying between them. The tiny one perks up when it sees her feet, stretches and then scampers right up to her with a curious nose, incredibly soft where it lets her pet its fur and just as sharp in teeth as the others. It bounds around after sniffing her, trembling with excitement at the grass, the chickens nearby, the air itself. Its barks are shrill and joyous.  
“Congratulations,” she whispers to her two full-growns. She is tired, and amazed, amazed, amazed.  
  
  
*  
  
  
There's not a concrete lesson; no way to 'win', anymore here than before. No paths to follow. She didn't walk this way to forgive herself, or have forgiveness passed onto her from everything she'd done, didn't come here to do anything but die at first. But she hadn't died. And still, somehow, absolution came.  
She thinks of Amy, days after peace settles in her chest. It makes a kind of sense. Amy's searing goodbye had been forgiveness flowing through her, scalding out whatever sickness was left. Looking back it doesn't surprise her that it'd hurt. She wonders if the others are here too, tall and impossible, watching with eyes large enough to see beyond and through. She wonders if she'll find them, or them her. If they would speak. What truths they'd show.  
  
But that's after.  
  
She isn't thinking of any of that when it settles in. It's just one night in the world like any other. One night, and she and her pack have settled down again in a forest with thick car-freshener air. It's raining, the semi-crystalized rain of this place that shatters apart on ground or leaves like light shatters apart through clouds. Beautiful. (Though it feels just the same as cold rain in Alabama did when she stands out underneath it with her head tipped up. The smell is the same, soft and surrounding, and all the colours deepen. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.) She's dug her and the dogs a spot under a tree to stay in, keeping close to the trunk. Mounds of dirt pushed into walls around the edges of it, as always. The only light is the moon filtering through the tree's needles. She doesn't leave the usual opening to see out; she can see the stars through the branches, once the rain stops.  
She's had long practice of this. Now and before. She knows it: the dirt under her fingernails, the dirt in her hair, the dry sponginess of the earth beneath her. The sight of the pack laying down peacefully with their haunches loose and their heads on their paws, the baby curled up in front of their parents almost comically since they're all the same size by now. (The puppy had grown fast, so fast, like the plants and the birds.) She knows them.  
Easy repetition. She takes two of the blankets from her backpack, laying one underneath her on the loose rocky dirt and one over her against the chill air. (Most of the colour has rubbed off of the blankets in the long days she's been walking. Even if it hadn't, the idea of red doesn't frighten her anymore.) One of her dogs huffs without moving their head, warm breath wafting over her. She smiles. Comforting.  
So easy to disappear. She shifts around so that she can lay with part of her head on her dog's side, and feel the others curl toward her stomach and her feet. Their number together would have alarmed her, sometime in the past, but not now. Now they're all fed, they're all healthy, all hidden and warm. It's all she needs.  
She closes her eyes; safety and inclusion close gently around her heart, unarticulated but _true,_ and she sleeps.

 

 /////


End file.
